The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.
Yes it’s her husband. She hasn’t got over it. Died thirty years ago.
A satisfied customer. We should have him stuffed.
Manuel will show you to your rooms – if you’re lucky.
I think the problem with people like this is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.
I have a tendency sometimes to get too logical with what I’m writing, just because I want it to be kind of perfect.
The open mode is a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate, because we’re not under pressure to get a specific thing done properly. We can play.
I tend to have an odd split in my mind: I tend to look at it as a writer and when the writing thing is OK and I’m happy with it, then I put on my actor’s hat.
You can’t make Christ funny. He’s self-aware, he’s too flexible within the situation. It’s rigidity, it’s when the ego takes over and the behavior becomes inappropriate that it becomes funny.
Why write about the past? Well, there’s more of it.
When you’re being stalked by an angry mob with raspberries, the first thing to do is to release a tiger.
High creativity is responding to situations without critical thought.
Ask yourself, “When does this decision have to be taken?” and having answered it, defer the decision until then, in order to give yourself maximum pondering time.
The most creative people have learned to tolerate the slight discomfort of indecision for much longer and so, just because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are more creative.
It’s easier to be creative if you’ve got other people to play with.
If you really don’t know where to start or if you’re stuck, start generating random connections and allow your intuition to tell you if one might lead somewhere interesting.
I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.
Either people walk round dressed as chickens or they listen to Beethoven.
Telling people how to be creative is easy – being creative is difficult.
I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?
When I was in school, I was beaten every 30 minutes. It never did me any harm except for some psychological mal-adjustments and blurred vision.